John Keegan and the Grand Tradition of Trashing Clausewitz: A Polemic

War in History

Volumn 1, Issue 3, 1994, Pages 319-336

  Bassford, Christopher ^a  

^a USMC Command and Staff College   (United States)

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EID: 84970757812     PISSN: 09683445     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/096834459400100305     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Spenser Wilkinson, ‘Killing No Murder: an Examination of Some New Theories of War’, Army Quarterly (October 1927) criticizing Basil Liddell Hart's The Remaking of Modern Armies (London, John Murray, 1927).
2. Basil Liddell Hart, ‘War, Limited’, Harper's Magazine 192, no. 1150 (March 1946), pp. 193-203.
3. This discussion of Liddell Hart is derived from Chapter 15 of my own book, Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815-1945 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1994).
4. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1957); Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1957).
5. Harry G. Summers, Jr. On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA, Presidio Press, 1982); Caspar Weinberger, ‘The Use of Force and the National Will’, Baltimore Sun, 3 December 1984, p. 11.
6. References to Clausewitz's On War (Vom Kriege, 1832) are to the translation by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976; 1984 ed.).
7. Headquarters, United States Marine Corps, FMFM 1: Warfighting (Washington, DC, 1989).
8. John K Aeegan, History of Warfare (New York, Knopf, 1993).
9. This view of Clausewitz as a failure in his military career appears to stem from some of Clausewitz's own musings to his wife concerning his failure to achieve certain personal ambitions. It also relates to speculations concerning the Clausewitz family's social status and dubious claims to nobility (which were in fact eventually confirmed by the king). These issues can be mutated into professional failure only with great effort, and that effort must ignore the considerable achievements of Clausewitz in obtaining prominence and general's rank despite some very real political obstacles to his advancement.
10. Keegan, Warfare pp. 22, 354, tries to have it both ways on this accusation, which he seems to believe but also knows to be intellectually indefensible. ‘And although this catastrophic outcome must not be laid at the door of Clausewitz's study, we are nevertheless right to see Clausewitz as the ideological father of the First World War… the objects of the First World War were determined in great measure by the thoughts that were Clausewitz's’.
11. Keegan, Warfare pp. 15-16, attributes this simply to frustration with the slow progress of Scharnhorst's ‘plot to flesh out the army under Napoleon's nose’. He fails to note the social character of the army's reforms. He also equates Clausewitz's actions with those of the murderous Japanese ultranationalists of the 1930s. Such analogies, pro- or con-, are awkward. John Wheeler-Bennett, in The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918-1945 (London, Macmillan, 1964), saw in Clausewitz's 1812 actions a positive precedent for German military resistance to Hitler, but neither analogy works very well: Clausewitz was not trying to assassinate anyone, and Keegan conveniently forgets that Napoleon was an aggressive tyrant who held Prussia in its alliance only by threatening to complete her total destruction.
12. Despite Keegan's own many examples of very different kinds of forces with which Clausewitz had actual contact, Clausewitz's advocacy of militia forces in Prussia's own war for liberation, and the discussion in On War of ‘people's war’, Keegan, Warfare, p. 222, insists throughout that Clausewitz understood ‘only one form of military organization: the paid and disciplined forces of the bureaucratic state’. In order to justify this view, and unable to find a suitably inane quotation from his victim's own writing, Keegan is reduced to quoting other writers with whom Clausewitz ‘would have probably’ agreed - particularly on the subject of the Cossacks (pp. 6-10).
13. The Economist, 2 October 1993, pp. 97-8. See also former navy secretary John Lehman's credulous review in The Wall Street Journal, 1 December 1993, A-18; or John Lancaster's in The Washington Monthly, November 1993.
14. Keegan, Warfare, p. 20; Keegan, ‘Peace by Other Means? War, Popular Opinion and the Politically Incorrect Clausewitz’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 December 1992, pp. 3-4.
15. Keegan, Warfare, pp. 21-2.
16. This postulates an extremely narrow definition of ‘politics’. Does Keegan really believe that military officers do not engage in unit or service (much less national and international) politics? Politics exists in all human groups; no one is disqualified from its practice. The wider definition I imply here is much more akin to what Clausewitz discusses.
17. Keegan, Warfare, p. 56.
18. Michael Howard, ‘To the Ruthless Belong the Spoils’, The New York Times Book Review, 14 November 1993.
19. Keegan, Warfare, p. 6, ignores this fundamental of Clausewitzian theory and says that Clausewitz was ‘struggling to advance a universal theory of what war ought to be, rather than what it actually was and had been’.
20. Jay Luvaas, ‘Clausewitz, Fuller and Liddell Hart’, in Michael Handel, ed. Clausewitz and Modern Strategy (London, Frank Cass, 1986), pp. 197-212; John Mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1988); Keegan, Warfare, pp. 48, 354.
21. Clausewitz, On War, pp. 133, 218, 488.
22. ‘Not every future war, however, is likely to be of this type; on the contrary, one may predict that most wars will tend to revert to wars of observation [i.e. of the most limited type]. A theory, to be of any practical use, must allow for that likelihood’. Clausewitz, On War, pp. 488.
23. In some ways as erroneous as Liddell Hart's or Keegan's, this is the vision of Clausewitz as ‘the preeminent military and political strategist of limited war in modern times’, a quotation from Robert Endicott Osgood, Limited War Revisited (Boulder, CO, Westview, 1979), p. 2.
24. The very first line of Keegan's main text tells us that ‘War is not the continuation of policy by other means’. Interestingly, and based on much the same grounds of rationality, it is the very last line in Russell F. Weigley's The Age of Battles: the Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 543. Weigley, however, does not attribute the concept in that form to Clausewitz, because, he tells me, he has come to recognize that this phrase in English is so misleading as to On War's actual argument. Interview, Quantico, VA, 9 September 1992.
25. One can argue forever about definitions of rationality and its opposite in regard to policy. Keegan, Warfare, p. 381, says that ‘the ultimate object of rational politics [by which I believe he means policy] is to further the well-being of political entities’. Clausewitz, On War, p. 606, says essentially the same thing, without believing that this necessarily corresponds to practice: ‘That it can err, subserve the ambitions, private interests, and vanity of those in power, is neither here nor there… here we can only treat policy as representative of all interests of the community.'
26. My definitions; Clausewitz does not distinguish the two concepts, both of which are represented by the one word Politik in German. However, this definition of politics is expressed in Clausewitz's famous paradoxical trinity - composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone’. Clausewitz, On War, p.89.
27. Although Clausewitz focuses largely on inter- and intra-state politics, it is not difficult to extend this definition to politics in opposition to or even without reference to the state, a point to keep in mind when considering other recent attacks on Clausewitz by writers like Martin van Creveld.
28. The latter interpretation is extremely common and frequently a source of hostility to Clausewitz. See, for example, David Kaiser, Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 415.
29. See, for example, Burton I. Kaufman, The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command (New York, Knopf, 1986), p. 150.
30. Keegan, Warfare, pp. 58, 381.
31. Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); The Development of Military Thought: the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1992).
32. Clausewitz, On War, pp. 580-1, 76.
33. A point that Keegan, previously author of a book entitled The Nature of War (New York: Holt, 1981), is recognizing when he notes acidly that ‘there is no such thing’ as a “‘nature of war” itself’. Keegan, Warfare, xi.
34. Clausewitz, On War, p. 80.
35. Despite his objections to Clausewitz's alleged emphasis on the total destruction of an enemy, Keegan, Warfare, p. xi, opens with a sneer at the ‘inutility of the “Western way of warfare”’ for its failure to utterly destroy Saddam Hussein, which ‘robbed the coalition's Clausewitzian victory of much of its point’.
36. The systematic dismantling of Iraq's military machine by the vastly superior coalition during a uniquely unbalanced conflict does offer some parallels to this analogy.
37. This last metaphor is one suggested, in a slightly different context, by Jane Holl (National Security Council staff) in a presentation to the USMC Command and Staff College, Quantico, VA, 23 October 1992. The point is that one must continue to live and interact with the now disgruntled spouse or, if that particular relationship has been ‘terminated with extreme prejudice’ (a very rare event in either marital or international politics), at least with the spouse's relatives and neighbours.
38. ‘Clausewitz, in short, was not a modern man’. Keegan, ‘Peace by Other Means?’ Whereas Keegan attacks Clausewitz as a proto-fascist, however, the fascist-leaning Fuller of the 1930s attacked him as a democrat. Such efforts are essentially ahistorical. Placed in the context of Napoleonic-era and Metternichian Prussia, Clausewitz's social and political views can be seen as distinctly enlightened and progressive. Viewed from the standpoint of an age repeatedly victimized by Prusso-German nationalism, events of an age long after he was dead, other of Clausewitz's attitudes are certainly open to suspicion. Clausewitz's politics are incomprehensible outside the context of his own era and are, in any case, irrelevant to the politics of modern ‘Clausewitzians’.
39. J.F.C. Fuller, The Dragon's Teeth: A Study of War and Peace (London, Constable and Company, 1932), pp. 66-7.
40. Clausewitz, On War, p. 149; J.F.C. Fuller, Foundations of the Science of War (London, Hutchinson and Company, 1926), 20.
41. Letter, Fuller to Sloane, undated but in reply to letter, Sloane to Fuller, 30 January 1961, Fuller papers, IV/6/5; IV/6/6a, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College London.
42. J.F.C. Fuller, The Conduct of War, 1789-1961: A Study of the French, Industrial and Russian Revolutions on War and its Conduct (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961), p. 12.
43. Clausewitz, On War, p. 75.
44. Keegan, Warfare, p. 32.
45. If it becomes a matter of their own survival of course, they well may, which would reinforce, rather than invalidate Clausewitz's argument.
46. Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism: Civilian and Military (New York, The Free Press, revised edn. 1959; originally New York, Norton, 1937).
47. Keegan, ‘Peace by Other Means?'
48. Clausewitz, On War, pp. 140-1.
49. See, for example, the very opening line in Keegan's ‘Peace by Other Means?’ Another example is Keegan's effort to tie Clausewitz to Marx in the hope, perhaps, that the eclipse of the one will imply that of the other.
50. Keegan, Warfare, p. xvi.
51. In his article, ‘Peace by Other Means?’, Keegan attempts to portray Clausewitz as a defender of ‘unrepresentative institutions’. He misuses a quotation from Peter Paret as evidence. When Paret says that Clausewitz's ‘political recognitions were one-sided’, he was referring to the philosopher's focus on foreign policy rather than domestic, not to his position on internal political structures. Since Clausewitz was in fact an advocate of parliamentary government, Keegan's accusation is false as well as pointless.
52. Richard H. Swain, ms review of Keegan's A History of Warfare, submitted to Military Review.
53. Letters, Times Literary Supplement, 15 and 22 January 1993.
54. Sad to say, even this motive is not original to Keegan, for it appears to have driven Liddell Hart and the young Fuller as well.